Professor Paddy Mallon:

I definitely think it would be a useful addition. At national level, we have no sight over the impact on a workforce of a large number of people within that workforce contracting Covid-19. Anecdotally, from my personal experience, having run a follow-up Covid clinic for the past five weeks, the vast majority of attendees at that clinic have been healthcare workers from a variety of settings. The majority of them did not initially contract the disease sufficiently badly to require hospitalisation. As we mentioned, some people have acquired a flu-like illness and have still not recovered three or four months later. It is really vital to our economy that we recognise the extent and the nature of that and be able to characterise it. There is no reason that the recovery of healthcare workers should be any different from the recovery of those in any other part of the workforce. For example, if we are going to open up our economy, we need to know the expected impact in terms of absenteeism and recovery times of any resurgence in cases in the community.